The slender fir, that taper grows,

The sturdy oak, with broad-spread boughs.
And beyond the purple grove,

Haunt of Phyllis, Queen of Love!
Gaudy as the opening dawn

Lies a long and level lawn,

On which a dark hill, steep and high,1
Holds and charms the wandering eye!
Deep are his feet in Towy's flood,
His sides are clothed with waving wood,
And ancient towers crown his brow,
That cast an awful look below;
Whose ragged walls the ivy creeps
And with her arms from falling keeps.

And see the rivers, how they run
Thro' woods and meads, in shade and sun,
Sometimes swiftly, sometimes slow,
Wave succeeding wave, they go.

Ever charming, ever new,

When will the landscape tire the view!
The fountain's fall, the river's flow,

The wooded valleys, warm and low,

The windy summit, wild and high
Roughly rushing on the sky!

See, on the mountain's southern side,
Where the prospect opens wide,
Where the evening gilds the tide,

How close and small the hedges lie!
What streaks of meadow cross the eye!
A step, methinks, may pass the stream,
So little distant dangers seem.

The Country Walk, though minutely detailed and proving close and accurate observation, is more common1 This is Dinevawr, or possibly Newton Castle.

place. In The Ruins of Rome the note is more rhetorical, but the pictures are vivid :—

The rising sun

Flames on the ruins, in the purer air
Towering aloft.

Or again

The setting sun displays

His visible great round between yon towers,
As through two shady cliffs.

And certainly the poem contains one of the finest onomatopoeic effects in our language, to say nothing of the fine imaginative power of the passage:

The pilgrim oft

At dead of night, 'mid his orison hears

Aghast the voice of Time, disparting towers,
Tumbling all precipitate down-dash'd,

Rattling around, loud thund'ring to the moon.

The descriptive passages in The Fleece have all the excellence of the particular kind indicated by Wordsworth. Take a typical passage-all who are acquainted with the parts of England here described will recognise the accuracy of the picture :

Such the spacious plain

Of Sarum, spread like Ocean's boundless round,
Where solitary Stonehenge, gray with moss,

Ruin of ages, nods: such, too, the leas
And ruddy tilth, which spiry Ross beholds,
From a green hillock, o'er her lofty elms;
And Lemster's brooky tract, and airy Croft;
And such Harleian Eyewood's swelling turf,
Wav'd as the billows of a rolling sea:

And Shobden, for its lofty terrace famed,

Which from a mountain's ridge, elate o'er woods
And girt with all Siluria, sees around

Regions on regions blended in the clouds.

The Fleece is, it must be owned, very heavy reading, "buried in woollen," as a contemporary critic wittily observed of its author; and as the descriptive passages are strictly subordinate to the didactic portion, their felicity lies rather in their terse and graphic force, such as

Enormous rocks on rocks, in ever-wild
Posture of falling.

And this description of a calm in the Tropics

The downy feather on the cordage hung,

Moves not the flat sea shines like yellow gold

Fus'd in the fire.

Dyer is, indeed, a most pleasing poet, and few would dispute what Wordsworth has expressed in his Sonnet to him :

A grateful few, shall love thy modest Lay,

Long as the shepherd's bleating flock shall stray,
Long as the thrush shall pipe on Grongar Hill!

AKENSIDE, ARMSTRONG, SHENSTONE, GRAINGER, MALLET, AND SMOLLETT

THERE is little to detain us in Akenside and Armstrong, who are rather rhetoricians than poets, and yet The Pleasures of the Imagination is in some respects a memorable poem, and at times not without the note of nobility, and The Art of Preserving Health deserves more readers than it finds. Natural description in Akenside is strictly subordinated to his didactic purpose. He was born in November 1721, at Newcastle-on-Tyne, and in a fragment of an intended Fourth Book to his chief poem, written in the last year of his life, he thus refers, not without pathos, to the haunts of his youth :

O ye dales

Of Tyne, and ye most ancient woodlands; where
Oft as the giant flood obliquely strides,

And his banks open and his lawns extend,
Stops short the pleased traveller to view,
Presiding o'er the scene, some rustic tower
Founded by Norman or by Saxon hands:
ye Northumbrian shades, which overlook

The rocky pavement and the mossy falls
Of solitary Wensbeck's limpid stream!
How gladly I recall your well-known seats,
Belov'd of old, and that delightful time
When all alone, for many a summer's day,
I wandered through your calm recesses, led
In silence by some powerful hand unseen.

The two passages in his poem which are his most elaborate Nature-pictures are his description in the Second Book of the wild spot where the Genius who describes to him "the gracious ways of providence confronts him, and the following passage in the Third Book, where he shows how man reads into Nature "the inexpressive semblance of himself, of thought and passion" :

Mark the sable woods

That shade sublime yon mountain's nodding brow:
With what religious awe the solemn scene
Commands your steps! as if the reverend form

Of Minos or of Numa should forsake

Th' Elysian seats, and down the embowering glade
Move to your pausing eye! Behold the expanse
Of yon gay landscape, where the silver clouds
Flit o'er the heavens before the sprightly breeze :
Now their gay cincture skirts the doubtful sun;
Now streams of splendour, through their opening veil
Effulgent, sweep from off the gilded lawn
The aerial shadows, on the curling brook,
And on the shady margin's quivering leaves
With quickest lustre glancing.

Armstrong's prosaic theme, with its subdivisions of “Air,” “Diet," "Exercise," "The Passions," does not promise much poetry, and poetry we do not find, but his